NEW NOW Festival returns to the industrial world heritage site of Zeche Zollverein in Essen (DE), once the world’s largest colliery, to conjure “Hypernatural Forces” in a major exhibition. Ten resident artists including AATB, Cinzia Campolese, Daniel Franke, Ali Phi, Sabrina Ratté, and Pinar Yoldas created new works that ponder the site’s political and environmental legacy. As visitors wander the caverns of the Mixing Plant, they encounter roaming robot packs and AI-generated eco-systems.

Australian architect and filmmaker Liam Young premieres a new docu-fiction installation, The Great Endeavor (2023), at this year’s Venice Biennale. The piece offers glimpses of a longer forthcoming film that approaches planetary-scale carbon sequestration with radical optimism. Young and consulting scientist Holly Jean Buck turn humanity’s largest engineering project into an infrastructural imaginary, “chronicling the coordinated action to decolonise the atmosphere in our last great act of planetary transformation.”

Hearings begin at the Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes (CICC): Extinction Wars at the Gwangju Museum of Art (KR). The Netherlands Pavilion at the 14th Gwangju Biennale, this second iteration of lawyer-activist Radha D’Souza and artist-researcher Jonas Staal’s CICC invites attendees to sit in as “prosecutors and witnesses from various social movements and activist organizations testify to the role of states and corporations in perpetuating climate war crimes” through April 9th.

Basel’s House of Electronic Arts (HEK) premieres new works by Pe Lang, Johanna Bruckner, and Jennifer Merlyn Scherler—three Swiss media artists and winners of the 2022 Pax Art Awards—in parallel solo exhibitions. Veteran Lang translated a scene from his forthcoming sci-fi novel into a kinetic light installation, whereas emerging talents Bruckner and Scherler authored CGI video and sculptural works that explore techno-bodies (image: Body Obfuscations, 2023) and climate anxiety.

Continuing his mission to call attention to the climate crimes unfolding at the Hambach and Garzweiler mines in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, French visual artist and activist Joanie Lemercier unveils Faces of Coal (2023), a series of plotter portraits of those responsible drawn in lignite coal. The first culprit: Markus Krebber, CEO of energy giant RWE, the German multinational operating the mines that, famously, laid waste to an entire region and are now the biggest source of CO2 in all of Europe.

“We Are Electric: Extraction, Extinction and Post-Carbon Futures” opens at the University of Queensland (UQ) Art Museum in Australia. Foregrounding “bodily and planetary flows, the politics of extraction and exchange,” artists including Diane Borsato, Haines & Hinterding, and the Institute for Queer Ecology urge action and offer paths forward; using the trappings of Big Oil—rusty drill bits and barrels—Quandamooka artist Megan Cope’s Untitled (Death Song) (image, 2020) sounds a dire alarm.

A survey of DISNOVATION.ORG’s ongoing Post Growth (2020–) research project opens at Kunsthaus Langenthal (CH) with the title “The Long Shadow of the Up Arrow.” The international collective challenges economic growth narratives with evocative thought experiments and prototypes that include videos, installations, objects, and texts. On view are, for example, the indoor farming experiment Life Support System, the diagrammatic CO2 cost analysis Shadow Growth, and samples from the 2021 book Bestiary of the Anthropocene.

Nandita Kumar’s solo exhibition “From Paradigm To Paradigm, Into the Biomic Time” opens at daadgalerie, Berlin. A deconstruction of the climate disinformation machine, Kumar’s titular news ticker regurgitates falsehoods as concrete poetry and a musical score. Using an algorithmic haiku generator, the Mauritian artist and 2022 DAAD Music & Sound Fellow translated 91 untrue statements into a 12-meter pianola loop that sonifies dissonance—“between the scientific community, political spheres, and the populace at large.”